


and they asked me in for dinner

by delhuillier



Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Cannibalism, M/M, Modern AU, daemon Grima, half-brothers Robin and Grima, half-daemon Robin, human Chrom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-23
Updated: 2018-06-23
Packaged: 2019-05-27 03:54:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,760
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15016127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delhuillier/pseuds/delhuillier
Summary: Sometimes Robin wishes he were more like Grima. Then he wouldn't have to care about any of this.





	and they asked me in for dinner

The injection finished, the sandman returns his tools to the small, matte black case characteristic of his profession. “You can open your eyes now, sir,” he says.

Chrom, who Robin has learned is not good with needles, tentatively cracks an eye. He scans his arm, all the way down to the bandages in the crook of his arm, covering the place where the sandman had put the needle in. “It’s over?”

“It’s over,” Libra says. He stands and takes his coat from Robin, who’d fetched it from the rack in the entrance hall. “As always, _try_ to avoid walking around while the pax takes effect. If the past few years are anything to go by, you’ll be drowsy in twenty or so minutes, and asleep in half an hour.”

“Got it,” Chrom says, arranging his long body more comfortably on the couch. “After last time, though, you don’t have to tell me twice.” He points ruefully to a scar splitting his eyebrow—one night, more fatigued than he’d realised from the pax, he’d fallen and cracked his head on the kitchen counter on the way down. “Won’t be getting up again.”

“I’m glad you’ve at last taken my warnings to heart,” Libra says with a gentle smile. “Anyway, I really should go. I’ve got twenty more house calls to make on my rounds tonight.”

Chrom gives Libra a lazy wave. “Thanks as usual, Libra. Drive safe.”

Libra inclines his head and goes out through the French doors that separate the living room from the entrance hall. Robin walks him to the door, and offers him an umbrella from the stand when he sees it’s raining outside.

“No need,” Libra says. “I’ll be in a car most of the night anyway.”

When Libra opens the door, the streetlight illuminates the pale column of his neck. Robin grits his teeth, mouth suddenly full of saliva, and his nails dig into his palms as his hands tighten into fists. 

“My regards to your brother,” Libra says, and descends the porch steps onto a sidewalk glistening with rain. 

“Half-brother,” Robin corrects him, pointlessly. He watches Libra fold his tall body into the car, its shiny black door splayed like a beetle’s wing, and then drive away.

Robin trudges back inside, closing the door quietly behind him. Chrom’s eyes are closed when Robin comes back into the living room, but they come open when Robin settles down onto the ottoman by his side. Chrom gazes at him, eyes hazy with sleep, and asks, “Are you all right?”

“What do you mean?” Robin asks. He gives himself a frantic mental once-over. Nothing should be showing—not yet, at least.

Chrom smiles vaguely. “I know you ran out of food yesterday,” he says. “Must be hungry.”

“I’ll survive. I think I should be asking _you_ if you’re all right. Considering...”

Chrom waves a heavy hand, dismissing Robin’s concerns. 

The pax is working quickly, tonight; Chrom has to fight to keep his eyes open, and the effect of the drug is made obvious by the question he asks next. He means to say “When’s Grima coming home?” but what tumbles out of his mouth is all slurred words and softened syllables.

“He said he had a late meeting today—there’s been some unrest in the…” Robin trails off, remembering just in time that Chrom might not appreciate hearing about Ylisstol, a city that lost its name a decade ago after it had become little more than a slum under the daemons’ rule, and is now known only as nameless slums. A place to keep all the humans that still, after all these years, refuse to bend the knee to the daemons.

“There’s just been some unrest lately, and he _does_ oversee internal affairs,” Robin says. “But he told me he’d try to be home at eight. Which is,” he adds, checking his watch, “right about now.”

In response, Chrom yawns, so widely his jaw pops. He mumbles something Robin can’t hear.

“What was that?”

Chrom gestures for Robin to come closer; Robin obligingly leans in. He feels Chrom’s knuckles graze his cheek, and muzzily, Chrom repeats what he’d said before. “Don’t worry so much about me.”

“How can I not?” Robin asks, flushing a little.

But Chrom’s asleep. Robin well knows, obviously, that it isn’t really sleep—instead, the pax has dropped him into the deep, dark well of unconsciousness, something even deeper and more profound than what is granted by anaesthesia. It needs to be that deep, of course.

In the soft light from the floor lamp by the head of the couch, Chrom’s skin looks warm and full of life, and he still breathes evenly, despite what the pax had done to him. Robin closes his eyes, trying not to think about it.

He gropes for Chrom’s hand to tangle their fingers together, and says again, “How can I not?”

=

Robin’s not sure how long he sits there by Chrom’s side, listening to Chrom’s slow, even breathing, but it seems like both seconds and hours later when he hears the sound of the door opening. He starts up from the ottoman, just as Grima sweeps into the living room like a cast shadow, slim and elegant in a long black coat and three-piece suit, all modified to accommodate his wings.

Where Grima is a full daemon, Robin is nothing but a mongrel, born to Grima’s father and a human woman who had died uneventfully when Robin was six, leaving him without hearth and home. Six eyes, six wings, razor-sharp teeth, nails like talons—Grima wears these signs of his heritage proudly, and indeed, were it not for them, he would be indistinguishable from a normal human, and from Robin himself. For despite the gulf between them, some quirk of genetics had given them similar human appearances: white hair, lean build, fine features.

Grima takes in Robin by Chrom’s side, and smirks. “Oh, look at you. You’ve got dinner all ready and waiting for me.” He tosses his umbrella, still wet from the rain, back out into the hallway with a clatter. “You don’t _know_ how hungry I am. Or maybe you do?”

“I don’t.”

Grima rolls his eyes, punctuating the gesture with a melodramatic groan of irritation. “Don’t lie to me, Robin. You look so pale, so weak…I was able to go out for lunch today, but how long have you gone without food?”

His face brightens suddenly. “How about something to tide you over?” With surprising suddenness, he brings his second finger up to his mouth and swipes it across his teeth, drawing quite a lot of blood.

The smell of it hits Robin like a punch to the stomach. He physically recoils, staggered by the wave of hunger that smashes through him like a tsunami. Robin, suddenly shaking, can barely stand from the force of it; all he can focus on is the blood washing across Grima’s skin, staining it a deep, deep red.

Grima presses closer. “Go on,” he says, watching Robin intently. “I don’t mind.”

Robin tries to resist. He really does. But he after spending every hour of every day fighting to keep the inhuman part of him under lock and key, after spending a day hungry, with none of the food he and Grima need to survive left, he’s weakened.

He can barely breathe for how much he wants to taste Grima’s blood. Snap off a finger in his teeth. Get at the veins and the tendons and the muscle—

He’s so hungry.

He hates it. He hates this primitive, bestial part of himself that urges him forward, that closes his hands around Grima’s hand. And he hates himself for giving in, because this is letting Grima win. All of this is a game to Grima, after all: he knows how much Robin struggles to keep the daemon in him quiescent, how much Robin despises that he needs flesh and blood, daemon or human, to keep living. Seeing Robin submit to his daemon side delights him.

Robin closes his mouth over Grima’s finger. He sucks on it, rendered shameless by his desperate hunger, savouring despite himself the blood sliding over his tongue, salty and hot and thick. Grima smiles, satisfied.

But with nourishment comes an awakening: Robin’s daemon side emerges from sleep, sniffs the air, follows the taste of blood. His mouth suddenly feels too full, and his jaw aches as his teeth hone themselves to a gleaming sharpness. He knows what he must look like, what Grima must see: blood-red eyes, a mouthful of knifelike teeth.

He pulls back, and sucks in a breath when he cuts himself with teeth he isn’t used to having. His whole body feels set aflame; the world around him paints itself in too-vivid, too-sharp colours and lines, infused with a vibrancy that his human eyes could never detect.

Robin tries to steady his breathing, his yearning for flesh quelled for the moment—and the smell of blood is already fading, thanks to how quickly daemons like Grima heal. He’s dazzled by the intensity of the new sensations he feels, as he always is; he can barely stay on his feet, and feels a tug in his gut, an urge to go hide somewhere dark and safe, like he used to do when he lived on the streets and had to eat, had to acknowledge the part of him that was so monstrous. The part of him that had driven everyone away from him—he’s too daemon to be human, too human to be daemon.

“Robin,” Grima says, almost affectionately, “you wouldn’t have such a hard time if you indulged that inhuman part of you more often. You would learn to endure it, and would, by embracing it, master it. Just look at me.”

“No part of you is human,” Robin snaps. “We’re not the same. I’m _not_ a monster.”

“Are you trying to insult me?” Grima asks, smile a narrow curve of amusement. “You must do better.”

Robin bites back something stronger. Though Grima has always been nothing but magnanimous, in the arrogant way of someone assured of their own power, he is still the one who gave Robin a home, rescuing him from a miserable life of scrounging in alleyways and dumps and sewers for abandoned corpses of humans and daemons alike, praying they’re not too spoiled for him to eat. He has never threatened to throw Robin out, but he doesn’t have to. Robin understands his boundaries.

Grima allows the silence to persist, but it’s not long before he loses interest. He shrugs off his coat, letting it slide to the floor in a heap, and says, “I’m going to slip into something more comfortable. Set the table, will you?”

“Already done,” Robin says. “An official was by earlier to make sure everything was sanitised and in order, so…”

“Wonderful,” Grima says. “You’re so diligent. Then—wait for me. I won’t be long.”

He slips out of the room, into the entrance hall, and soon Robin hears the click of his shoes on the wooden stairs that led to the second floor. Robin looks over at Chrom, and he trembles.

=

They move Chrom into the dining room together. Chrom is limp and unresponsive in their arms, even as they lay him out on the long dining table with a thick wooden top. It makes Robin infinitely glad the pax, one of the two gifts the daemons had given humanity in exchange for their surrender, exists.

Grima ties on an apron, and then beckons for Robin to come closer. Robin takes a few tentative steps closer to him, and Grima says, “Here,” passing him another apron.

Before the work begins, Grima feeds Robin more. He catches Robin’s chin with one hand, forces his mouth open; he pushes two fingers inside and says, “Go on. Eat.”

Robin struggles, fearing what will undoubtedly come later if he partakes of Grima’s flesh, but his sharp teeth catch at the pad of one of Grima’s fingers, filling his mouth with the tang of his brother’s blood. The next thing he knows is, he’s biting down—he tears the fingers free, spotting the plastic sheets he’d laid out on the floors earlier that day with crimson.

He hunches over his prize, and like a scavenger, picks the phalanges clean. When he’s swallowed down the blood and flesh and slurped up the strings of muscle like noodles, he crunches on the bones, pulverising them with the jaws and teeth of a daemon, and slurps the marrow from their insides.

After he finishes, disgust swirls sickeningly in his stomach. He’s no better than an animal.

“Feel better?” Grima asks, completely unruffled by what Robin had just done to him. As he speaks, the stumps of his fingers begin to repair themselves: new bone extends, as though placed by some invisible craftsman, and threads of new muscle spin into existence. “You will be able to help me, won’t you?”

Robin hesitates—as he always does. The beast inside him is docile for the moment, pleased with the gift Grima had given him, but he doesn’t trust it to stay quiet while they work. And worse, to participate is to accept his daemonhood.

Grima picks up the bone saw from the bench where Robin had laid out the tools. He flicks the metal with a claw, and meets Robin’s gaze evenly. “You wouldn’t want Chrom to get _too_ badly hurt, would you?”

Robin shuts his eyes, and when he opens them again, the only expression on his face is one of defeat. So he submits to Grima—as he always, always does.

“Fine.”

“Lovely,” Grima says. He returns the saw to its place. “Help me remove his clothes, would you?”

First come Chrom’s pants, then his shirt. Robin’s eyes linger for a moment on the brand on Chrom’s shoulder: a mark that showed him to be a member of the royal family that used to rule this land. Had the daemons not arrived, Chrom would still be a prince—now, like the house he had lived in near the palace, he’s just one of Grima’s belongings, kept near to ensure that most humans stayed on their best behaviour. 

Chrom lies on the table before him, naked save for a set of compression shorts that leave absolutely nothing to the imagination. But there’s nothing erotic about it at all. Not now.

“Panacea?” Grima asks.

Robin holds up a bottle of it—the second of two gifts that the daemons had given humans, it’s a viscous tincture derived from daemon blood that heals all wounds when applied to them and cures all illnesses when ingested. Its main use is in the households of wealthy daemons like Grima, to care for the sources of nourishment they can keep in-house, and in the farms.

Grima grins. And he gets to work.

The official that had been by earlier that day had not only checked that all the knives and the bone saw were properly sanitised, but also that they were properly sharpened, so the bone saw slides easily into Chrom’s flesh, just under where the compression shorts stop. It meets resistance when it runs into the femur buried in bone and viscera, but with a bit of pressure and a few back-and-forths, the teeth of the saw growling as they fight with the bones, the saw cuts through and down until it meets the wood beneath.

Robin moves quickly; he pours out a good amount of the panacea into the palm of his hand and then steps up by Grima’s side to slather the fluid on the stump of Chrom’s leg. Almost immediately, the injury begins to heal, veins tying off and blood drying up as patches of new skin, like pale, twisted flowers, grow in the sea of red.

With a plastic bucket in one hand to catch any blood, Grima hangs the severed leg from a hook hanging from the ceiling, driving the hook through the flesh between the Achilles tendon and the ankle. He trails his fingers through the blood pooling in the bucket, and sucks them clean.

They remove Chrom’s other leg and hang it up to drain like its fellow. Finished with Chrom, for now, they dress him in his clothes and move him back to the couch, where he sleeps on. Knowing that the pax leaves Chrom cold and shivery when he wakes, Robin carefully tucks a blanket around his shoulders—he wants Chrom to be as comfortable as possible when the drug lets him go.

Then, after skinning the legs, they begin the butchery proper. Grima watches Robin do it, offering guidance when he deems it necessary—indirectly, or, by insinuating himself into Robin’s space and placing his hand over Robin’s to guide the cut, directly. Robin removes the whole of the calf muscle from each leg, and sets it aside for Grima to divide into appropriately-sized portions—the food they’re harvesting now needs to last them two weeks, as required by the Ethical Dispensation of Essential Nourishment Law promulgated two years ago as a sop to a humankind chafed by the yoke of daemon domination. From the upper parts of both legs, he carves thick round steaks, and he cracks apart the knees to get at the tendons and bone Grima likes to take to work for lunch.

The smell of blood and meat is bearable, for now. How long it might be so, Robin doesn’t know.

“You’re learning,” Grima says, as Robin scrapes marrow from the long leg bones into a Tupperware container. “How civilised you’ve become.”

Robin ignores him, moving to wrap the meat they aren’t going to eat that night neatly in wax paper. It’s meant for the freezer—and there’s no need for seasoning or rub, because neither he nor Grima can consume human food.

After Robin packs the food into the freezer and the refrigerator, Grima gestures for Robin to come join him at the table, in the centre of which he’s piled the scraps of Chrom’s skin and other offal. With a wide smile, showing all his teeth, Grima says, “Sit, Robin.”

After a deep breath—in, out—Robin sits.

Grima gestures at the food on the table. “After you, Robin. I know you’re hungry.” He lounges back in his chair and puts his feet up on the table. “I can wait.”

Under the crushing weight of Grima’s gaze, Robin swallows thickly, and then, slowly, he reaches out. And like the monster he is, he dines. Sweet-smelling blood smeared on his fingers and cheeks, the give of skin under his teeth—he dines.

Grima inclines his head, as though satisfied, and joins him in supping on a human being. “You know,” Grima says, holding up a ragged strip of flesh for inspection, “for a royal, he doesn’t taste all that different from the commoners.” He pops the morsel in his mouth. “Still delicious, though.”

Robin says nothing, does nothing except keep eating. He can’t bring himself to look at Grima, to participate in the conversation as though this is anything _normal_.

Not for the first time, he finds himself wishing, deep down, that he were like Grima. That he hadn’t been born to a human and a daemon. Because it is that human side that had allowed him to live in blissful ignorance of his true nature for most of his childhood. Caught in the unique position he is, he had neither become accustomed to being eaten by daemons like humans do nor had he become accustomed to eating humans like daemons do.

But then again, if he were like Grima, this _would_ all be “normal” to him. He would see Chrom as nothing more than a food source, nothing more than property.

Once satiated, Grima licks his fingers one by one, like a contented cat. Finished too, Robin stands, and makes to go to the kitchen so he can fetch things to clean the table with—and so he can get away from Grima.

But Grima stops him. “Robin,” he says, "leave it, for now.”

He stands smoothly, and every one of his eyes fixes on Robin. Full of Chrom, Grima is too real, as though painted in ink when all the surroundings have been sketched in pencil. His wings shiver, flare out, and fold in again: he’s a carrion crow, a vulture, and Robin knows what he means to do. He’s known it since Grima fed him with his own flesh. All exchanges are just that—exchanges. And the time has come for him to pay his share.

“Come here, Robin.”

Robin hesitates, for too long, and Grima comes around the table in the time it takes Robin to blink. An arm snakes around Robin’s waist; a hand closes around Robin’s right wrist.

Daemons, Robin has learned, blessed with the ability to heal most wounds in handfuls of seconds, spill one another’s blood and consume one another’s flesh in the same way humans hold hands, kiss, have sex. There is an intimacy to wounding: a slow dance of give-and-take amongst the participants. There’s same primal release that humans feel in the whiteout depths of an orgasm, the same sharing of a part of you.

Grima forced Robin to take his own flesh, and as such Robin must now give Grima his. Give it, or have it taken from him against his own will. Because for daemons, that is how it works—no matter if you are brothers, sisters, siblings, parent and child, friends or enemies or strangers. That is how it works.

Grima drags Robin into the living room and presses him down on the couch next to Chrom’s unconscious form. His wings curl around them like a blanket of feathers, their softness a stark contrast to the brutality Grima’s grin promises.

So again, powerless because of Grima’s strength, Robin submits to Grima.

=

Chrom comes awake, feeling like he’s struggling up to the surface of water turned into treacle. The first thing he sees when he opens his eyes is Robin sitting on the ottoman next to him, his pale face limned with lamplight. A book lies splayed open on Robin’s lap; his focus on its pages has its usual intensity. He loses himself in books, luxuries of which he had been deprived for so long.

He watches Robin for a while. It’s quiet, and the only sounds are his and Robin’s breathing, the tapping of soft fingers of rain on the windows, and the crisp rustle of turning pages. Chrom doesn’t want to move—he’s cold, and numbness has stuffed his limbs with lead, and moving seems so beyond him at that point that he’s bothered not at all by the fact he no longer has legs.

Despite sharing blood, a face, a body, Robin and Grima are different in the profoundest of ways. Grima’s casual cruelty, Robin’s open kindness. Grima’s all edges, sharp enough to cut; Robin’s soft and gentle, open-hearted to those who show him the slightest bit of kindness.

As Chrom had, when he found Robin in the streets. He still remembers it: Robin, a thin scrap of a thing, cringing away from Chrom with his eyes squeezed shut—he’d been so certain Chrom was going to hit him. But Chrom had taken in the four missing eyes, the missing claws, the missing wings, and had realised, despite the blood staining Robin’s hands and ringing his mouth, that Robin was _different_.

He’s still not sure if it had been by coincidence or design that Grima had taken him to that neighbourhood that day—the one sealed off from the outside after the attack on a government building by the rebels. That Grima had taken him into the backstreets in search of an informant (a particularly eccentric half-daemon by the name of Henry, whom Grima always describes in affectionate terms), and had left Chrom to his own devices just in time for Chrom to see Robin scurry into an abandoned building not far from where Grima’s meeting was taking place.

Chrom, of course, seeing the white hair and the silhouette like Grima’s, had followed him. And instead of laying a hand on Robin, he’d offered it to him.

Robin’s voice: “Chrom!”

Chrom drifts back into the present. He meets Robin’s gaze, and smiles tiredly. “Hey.”

“How long have you been awake?” Robin asks. He marks his place in his book and puts it aside. “You should’ve said something—do you need anything? Water? Food? Just ask. I’ll get it for you.”

“Nothing now,” Chrom says. “...I was actually just thinking about you. About how we met. Come a long way, haven’t we?” Come a long way indeed—Chrom, entering the abandoned building, seeing the bony, malnourished young man squatting over half a rotting corpse...

“Oh.” One of Robin’s hands fists the fabric of his pants. “That’s, uh...”

At last, Chrom pushes his body into motion—he reaches out to lay his hand over Robin’s. “Don’t beat yourself up over any of it,” he says. “I think I’ve said that before.”

“But—I—” Robin inhales, swift and sharp. His eyes dart down to where Chrom’s legs used to be, and then up again. His eyes are wet. “I’m just...I’m s–so sorry, Chrom, I…”

Chrom’s fingers gently pry Robin’s hand from the fabric of his pants. He threads their fingers together. “Stop it,” he says. “I’ll get new legs tomorrow from the limb-factory. Grown specially for me, out of samples of my flesh and blood. You know that, don’t you?”

Robin nods, not quite looking at Chrom. It’s true—there’s a vibrant industry centred around replacing the limbs of nourishers, in the farms or otherwise. Unfortunately, it’s not the case that daemons can simply feed on those grown limbs: they need attachment to a living being. Only then, after the pulse of a human’s blood through their veins gives them life, can daemons use them as sustenance.

“And you know it just feels like a nap, when I’m given the pax. I go to bed, wake up hours later, and you and Grima have all the food you need.” Chrom waves a hand. “I mean, I don’t care about Grima, but you? You need to eat.”

“I—I don’t,” Robin says, “understand how you can be so _calm_ about this.” His hand clenches tight around Chrom’s. “I don’t.”

“I mean, think about it. I kind of have to be,” Chrom says. Robin’s still not looking at him, but his brow furrows slightly as he does what Chrom told him to.

The quiet returns, but not for long. “Think about my position,” Chrom says. “Think about the power Grima has. I’m no longer a prince, but I still—I want to do what I can to protect the people I _would_ have ruled in a better time. And that means placating Grima.”

Robin sniffles, and scrubs at his eyes with a sleeve. When he drops his arm, his eyes are dry, and his expression tight with unhappiness.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”

Chrom grins. “Thought you would.” He tugs on Robin’s hand. “C’mere. I’m cold.”

After some token resistance, and after Chrom manoeuvres himself onto his side, Robin folds himself onto the couch beside him. Chrom tucks the blanket around the both of them with an arm, and in the face of Robin’s warmth, the cold deep inside him from the pax finally begins to thaw.

Chrom wants to keep him—this young half-daemon, brimming with self-hatred—by his side for as long as he can. Because he wants to wrest that which gives Robin pain from his chest and replace it with the comforting knowledge that none of this is his fault.

When Robin speaks next, his voice is full of barren desolation, like the vast Plegian deserts.

“I don’t want to be like this anymore.”

“I know,” Chrom says, holding Robin close. “I know.”

Neither of them say what is to both of them obvious: there is nothing they can do. They don’t want to be like this—in Grima’s house. In this world ruled by daemons. Robin wants to be human, wants to live a normal life, and Chrom wants to be free, wants his _people_ to be free. They don’t want to be like this, but there is nothing they can do.

Instead, they’ll find solace where they can—in the heat of each other’s bodies, in the slide of skin against skin. And they’ll take things one day at a time. Because someday, maybe things will change.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading.
> 
> I don't know what the hell this is supposed to be, only that the idea for it would not leave me alone. I think I liked the tension that comes from the "bureaucratization" of something so taboo (eating humans).
> 
> I may do something else in this AU, someday? But for now this feels complete.
> 
> Also, the idea of Grima as a high-ranking government bureaucrat amused me far too much when I was writing this. On the other hand, the idea of Grima in a three-piece suit is _nice_.


End file.
